


the sharpest lives (are the deadliest to lead)

by soitgoes



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Mildly Dubious Consent, serial killer/assassin au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-02-27 16:05:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18742417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soitgoes/pseuds/soitgoes
Summary: Number Five likes to keep things simple, one bullet, one kill. He keeps the bullet and leaves the body. After pulling a job, Five tries to collect his due but finds his last bullet in a girl, Vanya. He has no idea who she is or what she’s hiding only that he wants her. So he takes her. Consequences be damned.Fiveya. Assassin/Serial Killer AU.





	1. happy birthday, number five

Part of him knows, from the moment he sees his slug in her gut, she's meant to belong to him. It’s instinct, pure instinct and impulse. Even as he’s pulling out his gun and pressing it into the skin on her forehead, he knows he isn’t going to shoot. He can’t. Before he knows it, he’s telling her to put pressure on the wound and wrapping her up in knitted throw and tossing her into the trunk of his car. She's an unexpected surprise, but its fitting that he should find her on this particular day, the first day in October, his birthday.

In retrospect, it had been a strange day all around. Number Five wakes a little early that morning, the first thing to go wrong that day. It’s only three minutes before his usual 4:00 am but Number Five rarely does anything too early or too late at least not without a very good reason. As he lies in bed, it’s a little hard to suppress his resentment towards the little red numbers on the digital clock besides his bed that read 3:57 am.

Number Five is not in the habit of putting much stock in petty things like birthdays and superstitions but he has nothing else to blame the abnormality on. It may not even be his real birthday, just a day that the Commission deemed worthy of telling him as much. Number Five doesn’t even have a name, not that he wants or needs one. His number is enough, Five, supposedly denoting the order in which he had been recruited by the Commission but that is too far back for even him to remember. Besides, it matters not how he’s earned his number only that it is his.

Despite a disappointing start, Five continues on with his day. Breakfast is a couple cups of black coffee and a piece of toast, half eaten. He turns on the radio, listens to whatever NPR has going that day. He barely puts in any effort to actually hear what is being said but he gathers that the topic they’re on is about the social hierarchy of bonobos in the wild. It’s interesting enough but he’s far more interested in the upkeep of a glass cabinet located on the far wall of his room. He takes a microfiber cloth and runs it over the smooth surface that shines and reflects a specter of the rows and rows of bullets it contains. Most are lugers, 9mm but there are a few Winchesters among them, Lapua's as well from his long range kills. Secretly, he favors those a little more than the rest because they were much harder to acquire. His eyes run quickly over the contents of the cabinet, each bullet is a name, each name a target, and each one is a kill done perfectly.

The job comes down the line at 4:49 am, just as he’s trying to leave the house to do a load of laundry. He’s surprised that he receives an assignment at all. Thursdays are a kind of day off for him, even cold-blooded killers need to grocery shop and do laundry. Still, the job is addressed specifically to him, a list of names, a location, and a strict time limit are listed out in measured, orderly lettering. At the bottom, in red font it reads:

Your accordance is: REQUIRED.

The “required” is a little surprising. Normally, accordance was listed as “appreciated” which is more a formality than anything else. Rarely is it acceptable or prudent to deny an assignment from the Commission without adequate justification. Five’s laundry, unfortunately, was not considered adequate justification. He has to comply either way so he looks over the assignment. From the matching surnames, Five surmises that he’s taking out a whole family, nine in all. He looks over the names and profiles, checks the times and layout of the property he’ll be infiltrating. It isn’t all that far, just under 50 miles outside of the city. Before noon, he’s packed and ready to leave. By 3:00 pm, he’s taking out perimeter guards.

The “required” label is still on his mind as he begins his work. Admittedly, security is a little heavier than what would be expected of what seems to be a typical WASP family who lives on a modest upstate property. He takes out ten armed guards in under twenty minutes and leaves them where they fall. None of them are on his list so he feels no need to commemorate their loss. It’s the nine bodies that he places in a neat line on the angora carpet in the parlor that he’s concerned about.

There’s nothing wrong with them at first glance. Five has no need to check the pictures from their profiles against the faces of the bodies. His eidetic memory conveniently ensures that he's got the right people. Each one has been neatly dispatched. A single bullet hole has been placed neatly between the eyes of eight of the nine bodies on the floor. The mother had been a little trickier than the rest to pin down but he had put a sufficient hole through her and managed to stay under the time that the Commission had requested. The problem isn’t that there are nine bodies but rather that he was able to recover only eight bullets. He’s run through the kill area a few times, sought out any stray bullet holes or marks that might lead him to his last take but he finds nothing.

It doesn’t help that he is still unable to figure out what is so important about these people that their deaths would require his attention specifically. The mother had had some combat training but nothing above some better than average self-defense classes. He glares down at the mother, Margaret Mason. Her pretty blonde hair is soaked through with blood and sweat, her sweater dress is ruined by the messy, sizable hole in her chest. The sight of it taunts him. It’s her bullet that’s missing.

He’s still mentally cursing the mother when something catches his eye. Near the banister is small smudge, bright red. He had missed it before but now it is all he can see. He must have written it off as just another blood spatter created in the initial fray. It certainly wouldn't be the only one but this particular smudge is different. It was made by a hand, could have been Margaret except it’s far too small. Couldn’t have been one of the kids. They were the first to go and had been dispatched long before they could leave behind any prints. He inspects the smudged print as he steps over the bodies and approaches, it starts off messy, organic but it ends on a clean, sudden line. Meaning just one thing.

A door.

It takes little more than a firm press of his hand against the wall and it dips inward then clicks open into a door. It swings in revealing beneath the stairs a small, barren room. At first it seems as though there is nothing within it except for dust and darkness which is cut now by the light that spills in. He pushes in further, ducking his head to enter fully and as soon as his eyes adjust he sees the crumpled shape of a girl pushed up against the left side of the room.

How she got in there without him noticing is a feat in and of itself but from the look of things she had done so while injured which is beyond impressive. She’s clutching her side, blood coloring the hand that she has pressed against the wound. That's where his missing bullet has gotten off to. He approaches her with the slow, measured steps of a practiced predator. There's no way for Five to know how subdued she is or how dangerous she may prove to be regardless of her injury. She is so small and thin, he thinks at first that she’s a child but when he turns her over and gets a good look he realizes that she older than he as first assumed, probably no more than a year or so younger than he is.

He looks down at her in the semi-darkness; it's obvious that she's not related to the family outside. At least not closely. Where the Masons are all tall and golden, she's pale and tiny. Her dark hair crowds her face, sticking to her ashen skin from sweat and Five is tempted to reach out and brush the stray strands away. He reaches for his gun instead.

At the sound of his safety clicking off, her eyes pop open. He expects her to scream or struggle, she does neither. She only stares up at him, expression blank and unafraid. No pleading, no bargaining even the hard as nails mother had begged. She opens her mouth only to sigh, her mouth is red with blood and when she breathes in she chokes. Warm flecks of blood speckles his face. Five is not the sort of man to balk when made to look into his victim's eyes or feel their blood still warm on his face. It's no different now.

He raises his gun to her forehead and she just continues to stare at him, breathing labored and throat bobbing painfully as she swallows down her own spit and blood. At the press of cold metal to her forehead, those doe-eyes slip closed almost as if she's relieved.

She swallows again but this one doesn't go down as easily. Her face crumples in pain, mouth twisting into a grimace as a drop of blood trickles from the side of her mouth, a shock of red along her pale chin. On impulse, Five takes his thumb and wipes at it along its path until his thumb finds its way back to her lips. He's made even more of a mess of her now, the red is smeared across her her chin and lips. But Five pays that no mind, all his attention is focused on the sensation of her hot, wet breath against the calloused skin of his thumb where he presses against the soft line of her red mouth. Then her eyes slip open, the weighted, heated look in her eye is surely just shock from the pain of the bullet still lodged in her gut but he's not beyond imagining it as something else. Something shivers through him and it’s been so long, Five had almost forgotten what it felt like, desire .

Five pulls away, leans back on his heels and checks the time on his wrist watch. He’s still got just under half an hour before the Cleaner shows up. Cleaners had always given Five the creeps so he has no intention of being here when they arrive. That gives him just about fifteen minutes to get her situated enough so that she won’t die before he can get her back into the city.

“Hey,” calls down to her, her eyes swivel up to meet his gaze.

Even in the dim lighting he can tell, she’s even paler than before. Her lips are ashen and he can see now that the hand she’s holding over her belly is beginning to shake.

“You’re gonna have to put a little more pressure on that if you’re planning on surviving,” he says and pushes his own hand roughly against her own.

His palm completely engulfs her own small, cold hand. He frowns. Falling body temp isn’t a great sign but it’s to be expected. From what he can see, she's lost a good amount of blood. Five presses down and he hears a sharp intake of breath but no sound. When he looks into her face again, her eyes are alight with pain but the sluggish, glassy-eyed look of shock is gone now. She’s far more present than she had been a couple minutes ago.

“Not exactly a barrel of oysters, I know, but you keep the pressure on or you die, got it?”

The girl just bites her lip and nods in response.

Before he knows it, he’s got her rolled up in a knitted throw rug in the trunk of his car. He makes sure she’s got a good amount of pressure on her wound and when he rolls her up he is careful to fold her arm in so that the pressure stays on even if she passes out. As he drives away into the night, he looks in his rear view mirror at the darkened estate as it passes out of view. However before the sight can completely disappear, he sees smoke begin to trail up into the sky illuminated from below by a quickly growing, orange glow. Fire is too messy to be Five’s first choice when it came to Cleaning but it gets the job done. For what it’s worth, his stomach drops a little thinking that had he not noticed her little smudge, had he not sought out his last slug, she would still be in that little hidden closet. He allows himself a quick glance backwards at the trunk.

Feeling uncharacteristically self-indulgent he murmurs to himself as he heads towards the city, “Happy birthday, Number Five.”


	2. happy birthday, vanya hargreeves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idk :\ it is 3:06 AM. I'll see how I feel after a couple hours of sleep. 
> 
> trying to do shorter chapters, hopefully it isn't super boring.

This isn’t exactly how Vanya had expected her twenty-fifth birthday to go. Not that she had been expecting cake and flowers but she had at least expected it to go just as badly as the day before. Instead she's been shot, rolled up in a carpet, and locked in a trunk. Still, as far as birthdays go, this isn't the worst one she's had so far. It’s pretty fitting that her birthday goes to heck, considering the day of her birth is perhaps her greatest misfortune.

It’s dark in the boot of his car. The musty smell of the knitted carpet, her own sweat and blood melds together with the exhaust fumes that trickle into the trunk as the car rumbles along. Vanya would feel ill if it wasn’t for the pain of the slug in her gut. Her head spins. There’s no way for her to know how long she’s been in the trunk. If there’s anything that Vanya learned from her youth it’s that pain affects one’s perception of time. Better not to consider it all and focus on something else, like the soft drone of the radio in the front cabin talking about the social hierarchy of bonobos in the wild.

_ In the wild, the female bonobo is socially superior to the male. _

She tries to fall into the soft, accented tone of the host's voice but the host’s line makes her think of Margaret. She too had certainly been the superior of her little clan. The Masons had taught Vanya a thing or two about pain. From the moment she had met Margaret two weeks prior, Vanya had known that the woman wasn’t right but hunger makes you do crazy things. Margaret had offered Vanya food and shelter out of what seemed to be the kindness of her heart. Vanya learned soon enough that Margaret always had ulterior motives. Though, as the current score stands, Margaret is no longer able to have motives. When the man from before had hefted her up in his arms and took her to the parlor, she had seen the bodies of the Masons laid out, Margaret amongst them. It was strange how her face could seem so peaceful when she was laid out and bloody with a hole in her chest big enough for Vanya to fit her fist through. It had been the bullet that put that hole in Margaret that is now lodged in her own stomach.

_ Sexual promiscuity is not only common among these primates but is an acceptable means of forming social bonds. _

The host’s voice is like a beacon that Vanya points her mind towards. Even with her powers suppressed by whatever Margaret had been injecting her with, Vanya’s acute sense of hearing is sharper than most. She can hear every part of the car even the front tires as dip suddenly sending a jolt of energy that rattles the entire car sending shockwaves backwards. It could have been anything, a speed bump, pothole, Vanya can’t be sure but whatever it is, she has no way to prepare for the punch the floor serves her as the back wheels pop up with such force that it sends her up into the hood of the trunk.

"Fuck," she hears from the front cabin along side the next line about bonobos.

Had she been able, Vanya would have screamed. Her mouth drops open and though no voice escapes, there is the crackle of air passing through her throat as she gasps. The pain makes her head swim, nearly knocks her out out but she manages to linger on the edge of consciousness. For the rest of the time, she hovers in that liminal place wedged between the pain of consciousness and the innocuous but terrifying oblivion. Vanya preferred to be awake than submit herself to whatever lay in the dark. How long she stays like that, Vanya can’t know.

Her teeth chatter, from shock or the car shuddering as it sits in idle for a few moments, Vanya can’t be sure until the engine shuts off and she is left in the dark and the silence, teeth still chattering. This pitch black dead air is worse than the pain of the bullet. No engine chatter, no measured-voice talking about bonobos, there's no sound. Nothing but darkness, the weight carpet around her squashing her down, the hollow sound of her own heartbeat echoing in her ears, panic rises.

Then, in the oppressive darkness, a metallic click sounds. In her panicked state, she mistakes it for the sound of a gun’s safety clicking off. But no, that’s the wrong darkness, the wrong smell of dust. That isn’t where she is. Her mind is slipping and she’s drifting in and out, unable to make the distinction between the present and memory. It all blends together in the darkness, in the silence. The the trunk opens with a whoosh . Light and blessed sound comes rushing in.

The carpet is still wrapped around her but change in light and sound is apparent. Above her she hears the rustle of fabric, something soft is placed in the trunk besides her feet. The way the sound carries and echoes, Vanya can tell they are parked in some kind of garage, concrete walls. She only has to wait a few more moments before the carpet around her loosens and she is unwrapped. Vanya gasps, this is the first bit of air that has been filtered through an old carpet in hours.

"You're still up.”

The voice seems to come from nothing. The glare of the fluorescent lights overhead is all she can see. Her eyes are so dilated from hours of pitch darkness but slowly they adjust and a dark shape emerges within the light. Just the suggestion of a human being but Vanya doesn’t need to see him to recognize him. His voice is enough for her, like an auditory fingerprint to her sensitive ears.

“You know, it doesn't really matter if you pass out at this point. Probably could have saved yourself some pain,” he says, his voice growing a little louder as he leans in.

His hands are crossed above his head, forearms resting on the edge of the trunk door. Vanya is a little taken aback by how normal he looks. Before, in the secret room that the Masons would often stash her in, she had barely been able to see him. Instead, she remembers him as the click of a gun’s safety and the cold press of metal to her forehead. As strange as it seems, Vanya is a surprised he even has a face.

A pale, square face framed by strong, dark brows and dark hair that is only slightly ruffled out of place. Vanya would peg him as young but it seems he is bone-tired and his weariness ages him. It had been his suit jacket that she heard rustling as he removed it and placed it at her feet. He looms above her, stripped down to his crisp white shirt, the perfect, bright expanse of it only interrupted by the straight, stark lines of his suspenders.

His eyes slide to her stomach and he tsks, “Shit. That looks pretty bad.”

Had she been in better condition, Vanya might have rolled her eyes. Currently, she is struggling just to keep them open but his next move causes her to snap to attention. He reaches into the trunk, one arm reaching over her. Her jaw drops on instinct and it takes all of her strength to lift her shoulders from the floor of the trunk. She snaps her teeth down, a satisfying click resulting from the force of her movement. With a huff and a pained expression she drops back to the floor. Her stomach pulses with red, angry agony. She struggles to breathe through the pain.

She hadn’t even been close catching him but it seems enough to give him pause. He raises an eyebrow at her and unfurls, standing straight again.

“So, you’d prefer to stay in the trunk?”

Truth be told, Vanya isn’t completely certain what she meant by snapping her teeth at him like a feral animal. Perhaps it is the pain, it has a way of turning you ragged, stretching you so thin until you are brittle. Or maybe there is something about that face, so impassive and unconcerned in the face of her obvious plight. Not that she isn’t used to it, Vanya has been victimized her whole life. Beaten, trapped, used, abused but she has survived it all. She reckons that she will probably survive him too and if she doesn’t? All she has to do is die. All she has to do is die and there are far worse things than dying.

“Not much of a talker, huh?”

Vanya glares up at him. There’s a million things that Vanya can think of as a response. He has a bad habit of stating the obvious and Vanya wonders if she wouldn’t have preferred it if he had killed her back when he had found her. The sudden scowl on his face makes her think that a bullet between the eyes might still be on the table. She can still remember the feeling of that metal barrel against her skin, the way it did not make her feel fear or distress but rather it calmed her, grounded her. Vanya had been ready for the bullet, ready to meet it halfway but she isn’t ready for what happens next.

A metallic squeak, then before she can react, the trunk slams shut and she cast back into silent darkness. She can’t even scream. Her breathing picks up immediately as she searches for anything in this abyss she’s been cast into. It takes herculean effort but Vanya manages to raise the hand that she isn’t pressing into her wounded belly. It takes her longer than she expects to find the solid mass of the trunk. Vanya presses her palm into the hard surface of it.

_Please_ , she thinks. _Please not like this. Anything but this_.

It is futile to hope. She knows this. In all her life, Vanya has never once gotten what she’s hoped for. She had hoped for a happy life and instead she has been given nothing but pain. She had hoped for mercy, from her father, from Margaret, from the whole world and she had been given a closed fist. There is no point in hoping but Vanya can’t help but do it anyway.

"I'm such a fucking bastard,” she hears him say outside, the sound of his voice is like a spark in the darkness.

The trunk gives beneath her palm, swinging up with a low moan. He is before her once again.

“Actually, I don’t really feel like having a dead body in my trunk today. It’s my birthday and I don't really feel like cleaning the smell of corpse out of my car. So you’re coming out of the trunk one way or another.”

As weary and seemingly ordinary as he was before but this time she feels tears beginning to form at the sight of him. She’s very nearly grateful. Her hand continues upward as he relays his speech to her. It doesn’t go unnoticed that it is his birthday as well but the urge, the frantic impulse to touch something real and solid overpowers the revelation of the that small detail. He is still talking when she grasps his perfect white shirt in her hand.

He glances down at her hand. It is filthy and smudges dark red on the white of his shirt, onto the buttons. Back to her eyes, he sees to see something there that makes him consider her differently than before. Softer and with some sympathy, perhaps.

“You’re ready then?”

She nods in response and he is quick to reach in to scoop her up. He’s less than gentle when he shoves one arm beneath her knees and the other under her shoulder. Pain shutters through her body again when he lifts her but it feels distant, murky. Unwilling to release her hold on him, Vanya adjusts her grip on his shirt upward to his collar. Even as her head lolls back, eyes rolling into the back of her head, her hand never loosens its grasp on him. Spots fill her vision. Thoughts flit in and out of her head.

The cold kindness of a barrel against her skin.

His round, dark button beneath her red thumb.

Margaret’s perfect face above the ragged hole in her chest.

Her father and slick, silent darkness, black as oil. She drowns.

And then finally, finally, the last thought that wanders through her hazy mind as it passes into oblivion.

_ Happy birthday, Vanya Hargreeves _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> man. I dunno what even I am doing. laters yall. comments give me life and egg me on. do it. dooooooo iiiiiit. oh god. it is 3:08 AM now.


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